


Millenium Prize Problems

by blackestofmarkets



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, Fake AH Crew, Minor Character Death, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-15
Packaged: 2018-08-21 18:25:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8255852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackestofmarkets/pseuds/blackestofmarkets
Summary: Against all common misconceptions, this is not a love story.





	1. Unsolved: Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap.

Against all common misconceptions, this is not a love story.

Love stories are easy.  
Variable X: There exist a man.  
Variable Y: There exist a woman.  
Variable Z: There exist a set of problems.  
If and only if the sum of vX and vY is greater than or equal to vZ, the logical solution is that Σ{X;Y;Z} will live forever fucking after.

This is not easy.  
This is just the problems.

 

###### **First unsolved problem: Yang-Mills Existence and Mass Gap.**

_Prove that for any compact simple gauge group G, a non-trivial quantum Yang–Mills theory exists on R4 and has a mass gap ∆ > 0\. – Arthur Jaffe, Edward Written_

_Or: Establish that at the speed of light, bound states of particles will form._

The first one he finds in a bar.  
Geoff’s twenty-six and angry, twenty-six and done with the Army, done with orders and formations and platoons in perfect rectangles. Most of all, he’s done with straight and narrow and ready to let everyone, from the bartender wiping down the chrome top with a dirty dishrag to the drunk in the corner on his last cheap shot feel it. He’s twenty-one and arguably stupid, but at least he knows how to pick a bar to broker a deal. 

It’s not a big thing, just some weed for college kids, frat boys and airheads with too much money on their hands. Fresh out of the Army with not much of a job ahead of him except a miserable existence in tech support or call centres, there’s really not much else than shuffling with the others in the underbelly of the city. 

The option of making a little something on the down low is preferable to slugging from place to place, job centre ladies turning their backs on his tattoos and crudeness and Geoff feels himself slowly suffocating under the weight of customer service. That day he quits his fifth call center job in just as many weeks, the first one enters his life.  
Not his first time, but the air’s different, or at least he feels like it is. There’s a few zip-locked baggies of weed in his left pocket, but the few grams of snow in the inside of his jacket feel like lead. 

Geoff feels irrationally marked as he enters, door creaking on its hinges. It’s the paranoia that usually comes with the sell, but this time it’s multiplied to the power of about fifteen fucking millions. There’s a brand on his skin, a sign around his neck, saying _arrest me, please, I’ve been a bad guy_ and as he forces himself to fix only on the bartender, who has given up his apathetic turn on the spotted bar top, he just swears that everyone can feel it. There’s usually a hum in the air when something bigger is going down. Everyone feels it, or maybe he’s just projecting his own damn experiences with witnessing a deal in public. 

_Not everyone’s as fucking cagey as you are, Ramsey_ , he reminds himself as he crosses the hardboard floor to take a seat. _Not everyone’s here a cop out to get your ass into a comfy cell_. It might be preferable still to the barstool on which he’s perched, though. It speaks true to the quality of this shithole that he can feel splinters even through the thick material of his trousers. He’s long since stopped judging the quality of the watered down whiskey the bartender places in front of him – for the few dollars he pays for a double neat, it really isn’t within his right to complain. Especially as he’s fairly sure the man knows what he’s here to accomplish. 

He’d be hard pressed not to. Geoff’s exchange point is usually the bathroom behind the bar and even though he tells the frat boys every time to _wait, wait at least fifteen damn minutes to get outta this dump_ , they’re too buoyed up on their meagre success to care, too inflated with the thrill of buying actual drugs with the money their parents so generously donated into their trust fund or the two hundred bucks they got for Christmas from their loving grandparents.

And who would really listen to a low-ladder drug peddler who doesn’t even sell the harder shit kids get into these days. Hell, Geoff wouldn’t listen to himself either if he had a Philippe Patek on his wrist, a bottle blonde off his arm and a few hours of fun to come in his pocket. If these kids are living like rockstars, he’s the washed up celebrity trying to cobble together a lifestyle, so low on the bottom of the food chain he doesn’t even register in the grand scheme of things.

His only consolation is that if he’s small fry, the cops in this place will have better things to do. His weed is, of course, courtesy of the current kingpin, as most of the guys he gets this from source from him. But that’ll change as soon as the flavour of the week, month, quarter has worn off and another cock in the cage has dethroned the present one and assumes his short-lived leadership, presiding over Los Santos with reckless abandon. It doesn’t really matter anyways. Drug dons come and come. At the end of the day, he’ll get his weed and upsell it to the same crowd he always does for minimal profit, but also minimal risk.

This time it’s different, though. This time he’s paying for his weed with the grams of crack currently burning a hole through his pocket. It’s supposed to be a simple smuggling job, just a quick swap-and-go for a minor businessman unfortunately too coked out to abstain from his next fix. At the time it had seemed like a small inconvenience, a great way to make some cash on the side by not having to pay for the baggies his man had handed him. 

Now, of course, in the middle of the bar with apparently every eye on him it seems like a _stupid fucking idea_. If he gets searched with this small inconvenience in his pocket, it’s the clink for sure, not just a fee and community hours. This is how people get into deep shit, but of course Geoff had been too tempted by the idea of a few hundred pro bono to consider the weight of this situation. But he’s in too deep to get out and by the looks of it, his client’s feeling just the same.

The guy sticks out like a sore thumb too, pressed suit not matching the cheap, polyester tie. Just his luck too that his taker for the evening is a Scrooge. If a buyer is all about largesse, but skimps on the small details, he’ll be more likely to try and argue about the price of the goods, trying to get a better deal like he’s haggling at Walmart for the discount he’s supposed to be entitled too. 

Geoff prefers the drunk kids to this type, at least they won’t attempt to pull a quick one on him. The man’s too sober for his comfort, eyes darting to Geoff, the bartender, the only other single man tucked away in the recesses of the bar, and back to Geoff again in a quicksilver way that for any cop or anyone familiar with users screams _addict, addict, addict_. His eyes are too large, his pupils too small, his hands too twitchy. 

All of these things are a sure sign that this sell is about to go tits up faster than he can say _don’t fucking approach me in the middle of the bar, you dumb fuck_ if he doesn’t pull it off real quick. This is not how he handles this usually. 

(This is not how he handles it at all.)

It’s about the time he’s sure the next few minutes are going to involve a shaky, tacked-together story about two old friends meeting and inconspicuously leaving for the bathroom together in a manner that will make it really blatantly clear that he’s either dealing or, even worse, selling something entirely different than the things currently in his pocket. 

Fuck. And he liked this location too, even if the glasses are never full or the tables always coated with something unidentified and better left alone. There’s no coming back. 

Crime’s organized even in the shady parts of the shadier districts of Los Santos and no hooker here goes without a pimp if they don’t want to end up with a few crowbars in their ribs and a kick to the teeth. Every bar and every place obeys this. This one’s ought to be no different and he’s not looking forward to an extended stay on the black list of this place.

But just about as he reacquaints himself to this series of events, something else entirely happens. A new variable enters the equation.

“Smoking’s not allowed in here,” the bartender’s voice booms, not looking up from where he’s taken to polishing the tap handles in a vain attempt to remove the splotchy discoloration from years of use and abuse.  
“If you feel like lighting up, damn well take it outside.”

At first Geoff thinks he’s talking to someone else in the room, but the man meets his eyes just for a moment, then turns his head to address his buyer who looks even more confused than Geoff himself thinks he must appear.  
“You too. The last thing this joint needs is a couple of douchebags stinking up the place with their cheap Marlboro Reds.”

A moment passes. A beat. Then something changes in the air between them, like particles suddenly spinning together in their electromagnetic field, joining as an inseparable unit at maximum velocity. And Geoff suddenly sees so clear as though a filmy layer has been lifted from his vision, as clear as the bartender’s eyes boring right through his skull.

“Sure thing,” he interrupts the businessman’s fumbling line about how no one has actually brandished a lighter, a pack of matches or an actually cigarette and slides off his stool, leaving his whiskey to turn even warmer on the counter.  
“Mind if I bum a smoke off you, man?”

His client is halfway between protesting and abandoning his search for what Geoff is carrying when realization hits him that the perfect opportunity has just been provided, neat and flawless like a fabricated mould they just need to slide into. He shuts his mouth and nods. That proves to be the greatest moment of Geoff’s entire evening so far.

“There’s an alley at the side, if you take the door besides the shitter,” the bartender calls out as they’re already turning away, one meaty thumb pointing towards said location.  
“Patrons don’t like the littering, so don’t drop your damn cigarette butts out front.”

Truthfully, Geoff couldn’t give a smaller shit about the other patrons, as the man so grandly calls the drunkards who frequent this shack, but the fact that he just facilitated a fucking drug deal without his own participation is still too much of a miracle to rouse his automatic antipathy the order would usually excite in him.

As his prayers that for once in his miserable drone life, the client will show an ounce of street smarts and down-to-honest-earth sense and just follow him quietly instead of making a fool of himself, do not go unanswered, he figures that this just might be a karmic retribution for the shit day he’s had so far. The job at the call center going up in flames, the watered down whiskey, the headache he’s been nursing for the longer part of the evening. Maybe something’s finally coming his way. Maybe this evening is about to take a turn for the better.

And wouldn’t it be nice to come home with a solid roll of cash in his pocket, nestled against the cavity of his chest right where the snow is currently lodged. To get quality food and booze instead of the low-level, shit-brand type he’s been drinking the past few weeks. There’s not much to do with a paycheck that stems from temp work and a drinking habit he doesn’t like to admit is directly correlated to how many times he’s had to keep himself from screaming into his headset this day. Or his fist.

The alley’s just a shadily lit as he’s imagined it to be, a light bulb above the door flickering to life as soon as he pulls it open, entirely oblivious to the chance that his client passes through it as well or if it slams right into his twitchy little rat face. From the muffled curse behind the solid wood, it’s the latter.

But Geoff can’t bring himself to care when he’s been presented with such a gold opportunity, even if his mind is working out the hidden motives behind the bartender’s impromptu spiel. If he’s expected to fork over a share of his intake, he’ll clock him straight and ball out. This job’s risky enough as it is on his own, he’s not taking along any freeloaders, no matter how many favours they’re fixed on doing him. The man better not be up to any tricks, no matter how young he must be, not much older than Geoff himself.

“What was that just now,” the client complains in a voice that’s just on the shy of nasal, grating on his nerves like sand stuck just between his teeth, in the softer part of his gums.  
“You know the guy?”

Given that he’s not exactly up for a friendly tête-à-tête at a quarter to eleven when there’s coke on him like a millstone around his neck, the distant sirens of pig cars in the distance like every other night in this district and a cool bottle of beer in his shitty bachelor pad’s fridge, the question is moot. 

“Not exactly.” is the answer his cash cow is decidedly unsatisfied with, opening his mouth to pose further queries and Geoff’s suddenly really damn tired of this.

“Look, you want this shit or not? ‘Cause I’ve been promised a speedy deal here and if there ain’t no taker, I’m not going to stick around.”

It’s intended to up the ante, to fire up some heat that’ll place poor guy on the burner and it seems to work right up to the moment where his hand enters his pocket, ostensibly to pull out the roll of twenties he’ll hand over in a mere moment. Right up to the point when all Geoff can think is _yes, motherfucker, hand over that shit_.

And then the door opens.

Of course the fucking door opens.

The man that steps out is surprisingly not the bartender, coming to retrieve his share of the sell, as Geoff sourly assumes in the first moment of the handle turning and the light sputtering back into a half-life, flicking yellow streaks over the dumpster with the foul smell of day-old garbage emerging, the butt-littered cobblestones, the glinting middle-class watch on the client’s middle-class wrist. 

It’s the single patron from before, the man sat in the nook of the bar with a lone Bud Light in front of him, staring into his beer like it holds the answers to all the unsolved problems Geoff learned about in high school. He’s short and round, a caricature of a man with his balding, reddish hair, an ill-fitting jacket straining at his round middle and his heavy jowls.

“You fellas mind if I join you?” he breaks the silence, eyes flicking between the two of them. And with that Geoff can feel his walls slam up immediately, every ounce of common fucking sense left in his brain that neither the Army with its fondness for mindless conforming nor his own substance abuse eating away the neurons of his prefrontal cortex one by one telling him _bad fucking idea. Get the hell outta dodge before you either end up with lead in your gut or steel on your wrists._

The man doesn’t exactly scream out undercover cop, but none of them really does and he’s certainly more suspicious than the most with his best attempt at a good-natured smile. His shtick is to be a man’s man, to chum them up and then casually drop a question.

__

Where can I find the good stuff, buddy?  
You know what I’m talking about.  
Is there a guy?  
Can you hook me up?  
Sometimes a man’s just gotta have a good time.

He knows the questions, has seen them in police stations and slideshows in the Army. In another life he could’ve been one of them, he supposes, slumming it with the best of them and the worst of them in Los Santos’ crime districts while really making his money for The Man. He would’ve been good at it too, if he could’ve kept his ego in check, his instructors told him time and time again. 

Instead here he is, suppressing what is possibly the worst fucking reaction to laugh in half-disbelief and half-scorn, a mean little chuckle at the expense of the trio of them.  
The client, whose already pale visage has turned ashy with the realization that getting his nearest fix might have just possibly turn out a ways harder to get than he’d envisioned this transaction to go, the fuzz, who’s looking at them with the expectant impression of an unpopular middle schooler desperate to be liked by the clique he’s been trying to impress, and Geoff himself.  
All of them are sweating and all for entirely different reasons.

He’s already mentally checked out, zipping up his jacket and pocketing his token lighter, brought out for insurance in case something like this actually happens, turning to the door with a shrug and a glance towards his guy.  
“Suit yourself, bud,” Geoff offers, the last word just a slight mockery of the officer’s upbeat, All-American patois.  
He refrains to give into the urge to add that he was just about to leave anyways. First thing a cop’s trained in: the more nervous you are, the more you talk. Attempt to justify yourself. Try and make the situation look normal.  
If you don’t talk, you got nothing to hide.

But apparently no one’s told that to the former buyer, who is again demonstrating his formidable adaption of a fish’s gaping mouth, flapping without words as he tries to figure out a way to salvage the situation and get himself the coke so near and yet so far. Unreachable in Geoff’s coat pocket as he places a hand on the door knob.

“Wait,” the _fucking moron_ blurts out, just as the patron, seemingly surprised at his imminent exit, shapes up to open his mouth and offer an invitation, to get back control of the situation.

Geoff’s not entirely sure who even has control of the status quo right now. All he knows that as sure as dicks isn’t him.

“You can’t leave, man,” the rat of a client continues, unawares of the fact that he’s just fucked up their only way of safe escape.  
“You still—“

There’s a beat of silence. And then, out of the corner of his eye, he sees the copper’s fucking face light up like it’s the fourth of July.  
Mother _fucker_. This could’ve been such a good night.

He knows exactly where this will lead and he’s regretfully validated when the little round man turns towards the mousey asshole and addresses him with a bashful “Aw, I haven’t gotten into anything, have I?” that is so transparent Geoff could see right onto the dirty alleyway through it.  
“He owe you some stuff?” he continues, just a tad too eager and the moment of realization on his guy’s face would be glorious, if it wouldn’t be so fucking sad at the same time.

All he can think is _fuck, I’m so screwed_ before the shitshow begins.

There is another moment of foreboding silence and then both men are talking while he still stands there, hand clenched so tightly around the knob that the cheap metal warms in his hands, the other buried in a fist in his jacket pocket, a pillar of salt, Lot’s wife even though he hasn’t even turned around yet.

There’s still the option of making a run for it, even if he’s not sure who of the two idiots would be hotter on his heels, the addict or the fuzz.

That option gets shot to hell though when he moves just the slightest of bits.

Suddenly time, previously having dragged along like a coat of honey had been spread over the whole situation, tension hanging in the air like string theory, speeds up, approaching the speed of light as things get ugly fast.

And by fast, he means real fast.

There’s a gun in the cokehead’s hand, shakingly pointed at Geoff, then at the cop who raises his hands with a shout, then at Geoff again, who has also taken a few steps back, showing his bare hands in bewildered surrender.  
All he has time to think is _shit, that wasn’t cash in his pocket, was it_ , before things move again, so quick, so fucking quick.

The police apparently breeds their undercover men better than he is used to, compared to the lacklustre LSPD force and their mediocre reaction times, because the motion of raising his hands in apparent surrender turns into a second gun materializing out of thin air. Or rather out of the cop’s mix-blend jacket.

There is noise all of a sudden, the two men both shouting at each other and Geoff, both trying to get a semblance of control over what is happening, to bend this situation to their will. As expected, neither of them achieves their goal.

The addict’s hands shake.

The cop’s hands do not.

Before he can react, there’s the familiar _bang_ of what is a standard issue Smith  & Wesson M&P9 firing, gunsmoke acrid in his nose like the fumes of a chemical reaction. He doesn’t even have to look to hear the sound of a body crumpling to the floor, the sound of what is his free life slowly fading away to be replaced of a vision of an eternity spent behind bars.  
His first deal, gone ballistic in the truest verbiage. Burnie would fucking _laugh_.

He expected one of them to fire.  
What he does not expect is the second shot.

It’s a deep one, not the cheap little puff of the gun his buyer had been carrying and for a moment his eyes meet the ones of the cop, both of them equally as surprised. The man’s mouth forms a round little “o” in what is almost ridiculous in its neatness, a perfect little circle.  
It matches the round little hole in his forehead.

Geoff would be lying if he said he could see through it to the shooter. This isn’t a fucking Western, after all. But his surprise is just as short-lived as the cop’s unsteady stance and in a moment there’s another familiar thump of a corpse on the ground, revealing the barrel of a damn fine shotgun.

The evening has turned out so bad, he isn’t even surprised to meet the level eyes of the bartender behind the gun.

In all the times he’s visited the bar so far, he’s never really looked at the man, but now that they’re locked onto each other, Geoff finds that he can’t really explain this shortcoming on his part.

His counterpart is tall and heavy-set without appearing pudgy, with a good solid set of muscles and a sturdy stance. He looks like a retired quarterback, just out of the game long enough to gather some extra weight, but still strong enough to floor you in a single strike if needed. His beard is very dense, his hands are very still, his eyes are very brown.  
Everything about him screams density, durability, firmness.

The particles around them seem to be drawn to him, but Geoff can’t prove this without further evidence, he _needs_ more data before equalling correlation to causation.  
People are easy, so easy, but he has found his first one. His first unsolved problem.

It’s a long time before one of them moves.

And Geoff is aware he must be grinning like a lunatic, the blood of two men speckled on his cheek, flakes of cocaine clinging to his fingers and clumped gluons around them, but he can’t figure out a way to care again.

_“Would you like to work for me?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Will contain all tagged characters eventually.


	2. Unsolved: The Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They had sat on opposite sides of the bar, Geoff on the same splintery stool he’d perched on three damn years ago and when Jack had said _we need someone to help us coordinate this fucking job_ he’d finally caved, swigged his drink and said _yes, yes, God, I’ll fucking do it if there’s no other way_.

****

######  Second unsolved problem: The Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness. 

****

_(A) Let u be a weak solution of the Navier–Stokes equations, satisfying suitable growth conditions. Let E be the singular set of u. Then P1(E) = 0.  
(B) Given a divergence-free vector field u◦(x) and a force f(x,t) satisfying (4) and (5), there exists a weak solution of Navier–Stokes (1), (2), (3) satisfying the growth conditions in (A). – Charles L. Feffermann_

_Or: Establish that in a three-dimensional system, fluid in space will exhibit motions that always satisfy a smooth solution._

###### 

The second one, surprisingly, comes to him.

It’s such an innocuous little thing, an ad. Who’d ever suspect an advertisement. Everyone advertises these days, or at least that’s what they’ve been told. Little grandmothers searching for someone to help with with carrying their bags, shopping for groceries, walking their dogs. Murdering their husbands. College students searching for a tutor, a friend, a possible hook-up. Anyone, really. If it isn’t in the newspaper, it’s on the internet and if it’s on the internet, it’s everywhere.

The beautiful thing about everywhere, though, is that one of the premises to global advertisement is that it has to be clean. Or if it isn’t, at least make it look clean. 

Geoff isn’t a big reader, even if sometimes he vaguely, abstractly considers it. Just for the fun of it. Let them have their expensive cars, expensive booze and expensive women, he’ll have something more expensive: time. That’s not to say he won’t waste it on exactly that, but there will come a day he will actually have time and then he will sit his ass down and he will read. Every fucking day. When cars, booze and women aren’t on his mind.

For now, though, he’ll be satisfied with only rifling through a few pages whenever he can scrounge up the time, but there are some lines you just don’t forget. _One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’s “people started to act as if I was too dumb to hear or see or say anything at all”_ or Fitzgerald’s line about _boats beating endlessly_ against some tide or other. And Harris’s _Hannibal Lecter_. He remembers being briefly thrilled at the opportunity to actually read something in his English class that wasn't just another mindless recycled rotation of Miller or Vonnegut. 

_Surrender to the local authorities, please, the enemies are drawing near. – Hannah_

It screams of a pompousness he can’t bear in anyone, least of all in himself, to feel smug about a literary reference, the kind of hipster smug he walks a very high tightrope on with his tattoos and beard, as he navigates through Craigslist, jumping through a number of hoops that will assure the general public that yes, he is just looking for another employee, no, this does not involve or incite any kind of sexual advancements, neither on his side nor on the one of his future possible employee.

It does not have the illustrious sound of crime that Harris portrays, men in fine suits with wine glasses in their hands and human body parts in their mouth.  
Their kind of crime is a different kind of ugly.

It’s all fun and games to glamourize violence and law-breaking in books and movies, but there’s nothing fun about selling coke and the guns they can get their hands on from the back of Jack’s ( _Jack, Jack, Jack, air in his lungs, hands on his rifle, calm in the dark when he is stumbling_ ) bar.

(Maybe it is a little fun.)

But it’s the ugly kind of fun, just like their lifestyle is the ugly kind of crime. Constantly wary, constantly paranoid that either the cops are going to be bringing the heat any second, with a warranty and several police cars (he does not delude himself enough, visions of largesse and grandeur he might entertain, that they are in any way a big enough stone in the sea that their ripples might warrant a SWAT team), or that Sanchez’s replacement’s replacement will bust their heads for their little independent establishment.

Of course, he’s got Burnie helping him out, even if he’s too damn proud to ask for any kind of handouts. They pay for their snow and mollies just the same as everyone else catering to the Cockbites does. It comes with all the dangers anyone else would face when illegally peddling all kinds of skeevy shit, including what little part of ammunition and guns they can get their hands on.

Late at night, when they’re waiting for their contact to arrive, a sorry little lightbulb the only illumination, Geoff sometimes tells Jack about his plans, his background the steady _drip drip drip_ of the sink and the sounds of violence outside.  
And Jack listens.

 _Build something_ , he says to the bass of freight trains rolling over bridges, cargobobs and choppers humming in the air.  
_Start it from the ground_ is the underlying melody of sirens in the distance, of honks and angry shouts.  
_We could make it the falsetto_ , the solo of children crying, women screaming, car alarms going off.

No, this is not the pretty side of crime.

They fall asleep later, lulled to sleep by the song of a city that never rests, never dolls itself up to look pretty. They fall asleep listening to what the city is really like. There’s pale morning light streaking through the dusty windows, illuminating stains and wrinkles, dirt and glory.  
This is not pretty at all.

But no matter how much the upper side might despise their lives, call them drug dealers and enablers, a man’s gotta live somehow, the words of his grandfather, of any grandfather, any man before the war in his ears. A man’s gotta eat somehow.  
Their way of bringing food to their dirty table is to do what they do best: upsell and fake their way through public health inspections and gang members drinking in their bar, only a hundred feet away from where their white gold lies.

It’s been three years and they’re not quite there yet, but they’re working on it.

It’s been three years and Geoff finally places an ad on Craigslist.

_Looking for a tech guy for customer service, transport industry and security._  
Must have both technical and practical knowledge and be open for new and unusual business opportunities.  
Sales experience mandatory (5yrs+).  
Contact G.R. at XXXX XX XXXX 

He’s no writer, just as he’s no reader, no poet, no scientist. And it’s nowhere near as impressing as Harris or Whitman, but it’s serviceable. Does its job. 

It’ll do just fine for the clientele they are trying to haul in.

It’s not that he exactly wants to let someone join them, but the work’s growing steadily. It’s approaching a point where two men alone can no longer handle the kind of orders they’re getting. And it’s madness, three years ago Geoff would’ve laughed anyone who told him that he’d be building an empire at a glacial pace in the back or a rundown bar out of the house.  
Or he’d ask them if he could take a draw of that blunt, because clearly they’d be both on something and on something viciously laced.

Now, though? He’s happy for any help he can get. It had taken some convincing and a few serious all-nighters both on his and on Jack’s side when their deliveries had been large enough to possibly raise suspicion. They had sat on opposite sides of the bar, Geoff on the same splintery stool he’d perched on three damn years ago and when Jack had said _we need someone to help us coordinate this fucking job_ he’d finally caved, swigged his drink and said _yes, yes, God, I’ll fucking do it if there’s no other way_.

For weeks now there has been nothing except mousy young IT graduates who’d taken one look at the bar and booked it out of here, a steady stream of people thinking this’d be some sort of MLM shit or heroin addicts understanding the cipher, but just scoping out their opportunities to get their fix from behind the door with three looks and two keys. No one tells them where the third key is.

For weeks and weeks they are left with work and work and more uncoordinated chaos than they are able to stomach and Geoff has been close to pulling the ad more than just a few times. Has been close to just saying _fuck it_ and _we’ll scale this shit back a bit, stick to the drugs and drop the weapons_ , but then, like the siren song of the counter culture beckoning its victims into a spiral of substance abuse and illegitimateness, someone answers in a way that doesn’t cause Geoff to trash his message two lines into reading.

It doesn’t hurt that his grammar and capitalization is impeccable too.

The applicant’s username is BMVagabond (“what the fuck kinda name is this?” Geoff asks in the grey light of a miserably wet morning, more into his coffee mug than himself and Jack from where he’s unpackaging their newest shipment snorts and retorts “what the fuck kinda name is DGGeoff?”, the bastard) and he’s more than willing to work for them on the not impressive, but also not incredibly meagre salary they can offer him.

BMVagabond comes with a honestly impressive skillset based on his very incomplete CV that really makes Geoff wonder why he’d not found work in a reputable place yet. Jack bets drugs or embezzlement, but somehow that neat way of typing, the straight-up and straight-laced answers he receives, even if the man’s a bit cagey with his personal information, doesn’t point towards an addict. It’s too smooth, somehow, even if he cannot put a finger on it, cannot in the slightest way prove this kind of water-off-a-duck’s-back smoothness

Still, he references working as both security detail and logistics manager before and that’s enough for them to give it a try. 

_You miss all of the shots you don’t take, even if it’s a shot in the dark_ , Jack says, drinks the last of Geoff’s coffee and vanishes back out to serve their customers come to drink themselves into an 11am-early grave before Geoff can curse at him.

He can’t really argue with a man who has stolen both beard and proverbs from early retirement, so Geoff curses the empty air instead, curses the fucking situation and himself for good measure and opens up a window to privately message BMVagabond.

BMVagabond (“just call me Ryan”) has a friendly, low voice, no last name and incredibly blue eyes.  
Coincidentally he also has exactly what they’re looking for.  
Within a few days Just-Ryan has completely redesigned their delivery schedule to the point that both of them actually sleep two full nights and then look at each other with the sort of look that implies that yeah. They can’t believe it either.

Ryan works bar, gives old ladies directions, laughs like Kermit the Frog and clocks unruly customers with a strength that no one would except from a man with the kind of high waist jeans Geoff’s father would have bought at Target in the 90s, New Balance sneakers and a haircut that rivals young Jonathan Taylor Thomas. He is, essentially, a riddle wrapped in an enigma carefully packaged in the kind of Chinese puzzle box with thirty different steps.

He also works with a ruthless efficiency, asks no questions and most importantly, silently accepts their explanations of the shipments he’s been coordinating as “imported goods we upsell to bored suits with too much cash and spare time on their hands”. It’s a miserable explanation and they are sure he knows what they’re selling isn’t more exotic porn videos or Maori masks smuggled into the country.

If he does, though, he makes no mention of it, stays away from the locked room, doesn’t mess with any of the packages besides dropping them off where they’ll stow them away. And he keeps his mouth shut.

In fact, he keeps his mouth shut so tightly that Geoff is somehow concerned that he’s just biding his time to sell them out to the highest bidder. Jack calls him paranoid with a sense of fondness he doesn’t dare examine further, for fear what he might find in the recesses of his lizard brain, but. 

At three in the morning, with nothing but a bunch of rowdy college kids way too far downtown for the state of their Alpha Kappa Phi hoodies and their cocky, brash laughter, a drunkard slurringly crying into his fifth glass of moonshine and Ryan’s blue eyes (waiting, _considering_ ) in the half-light -- Geoff thinks.

And then he thinks again.

And then he tops his drink off, goes all in, bottoms up and smiles at Ryan, teeth white and wet and glistening with vodka.

###### 

Trouble finds them, as is par de course for anyone trying to avoid hitting rock bottom. They’re bracing their highs and their lows day by day, steadily working against pretty dual alliterations like big corporates and big cartels, government and gun smugglers, the Man and the mafia, steadily beating against the tide like they’re re-enacting F. Scott Fitzgerald. 

Geoff doesn’t say that last bit to Jack, but he does mention it to Ryan in a completely different context. The sideways look and laugh he gets is enough to add _possible literature major_ to the list he’s compiled about the man. It’s not very long, more holes than substance, but he adds new things every day.

_Doesn’t drink, even when left alone with alcohol._  
Wears blue over grey, but grey over red.  
Can throw a knife. 

The last bit is a slight surprise, but nobody really knows anyone. He doesn’t know Jack used to bald until it slips out one night in conversation over empty beer bottles and a shared cigarette. It’s not the good stuff yet, but they’re at least over Bud Light and self-rolled tobacco by this point.

So when on a smog-filled, fading March evening a young asshole attempts to use the Benchmade or Spyderco he probably stole out of his father’s hunting safe to use the bar’s walls for target practice, Geoff doesn’t attempt to stop him. Instead he sits back and enjoys the show.

Ryan’s voice is deceptively friendly as he intervenes, emerging from behind the bar with the bottle opener still in his hand. There is nothing dangerous about a man in trainers and a dishrag tucked into the waist of his trousers, so the little shit can’t be entirely faulted for not taking him seriously at first.

But there’s also nothing dangerous about alligators at a zoo. You see them lazing in the sun, fat and immovable, eyes mostly closed. They give off the impression that were they ever to move, they’d be too damn slow to pose any real threat. Geoff’s seen an alligator move though.  
He’s seen the carnage and he’s seen those eyes.

Possibly bloodlust isn’t the right word to describe the slight glint in an alligator’s eyes when it attacks. Bloodlust is hot. It’s hot and heavy and damp, like a blanket made out of blood and it sticks to you, because there’s something _in it_. The anger of the human race, possibly.

There is nothing so kind as human in that gaze when focused upon a victim. They’re cold. Cold and lazy and cruel. Bloodlust might be an inherently violent trait, but at least there is some warmth in it, even if it derives from spilled bodily fluid. But Ryan’s unblinking, reptile stare is not warm when he approaches.

His smile is warm.  
His outstretched hands are warm.  
His laughter is warm.  
His eyes are not.

So Geoff sits back, has Jack bring him another beer and watches the dirt of the city spill in through the opening door, particles dancing in the polluting air.  
He feels that curious pull again, but this time it’s not clumping, it’s fluid and so incredibly smooth he thinks the smog might be liquid. Gas.

While the waste this city pumps out every day through big chimneys and even bigger brand names forms frictionless gaseous matter in their little bar, Ryan’s moves are of a sleek texture that has him thinking _oh. I could use someone like you_. 

Later this evening, there’s a slamming door and several fraternity insignias left behind inexplainably and Ryan has returned behind the counter to joke with a new customer about the ballot count scandal that has emerged in the electoral campaign for Los Santos’ mayoral duties, you could almost believe that smoothness had never existed. That there’s no way that in this plane of dimensions this could be established as true without doubt, Q.E.D.

They don’t talk about the way those kids leave.

They don’t talk about Jack in the next room over, locking the door behind him to count grenades methodically while he ignores the rapid rise in noise from the bar.

They don’t talk about any matter that does not need to be addressed, really.

Geoff’s not even particularly mad about the three-inch deep split in the wood right next to the pathetic scratch the knife made when bouncing off the wall. And if Ryan’s hands wander to his belt just once during his shift, where he’s hung the folding knife on one of those ridiculous wallet chains he insists upon using, well. He’s not going to be a Mr. Know-It-All and chalk it up to any sort of Eckman and Navarro type of psychological tell.  
Something something body language, he thinks deliberately hazily, lazily and then raises his glass for another cold drink from warm hands and cold eyes.

###### 

The trouble that finds them is not this though.

This is just an interlude.

Trouble finds them nonetheless.

###### 

There is a song playing on the radio these days that goes:

_sorrow found me when I was young_  
sorrow waited  
sorrow won 

And they like to murmur parodies of it under their breaths, satirizing the long, drawn-out notes and the sophomore year type of drama. More often than not they stare each other down unblinkingly with an endless barrage of _your mom found me when I was young_ references they really shouldn’t be making at their age, but Geoff’s favourite one, unironically, is Jack’s slightly too large, glorious grin, hands full with neat little bags and shining black plastic whilst belting it out.

_trouble came to me today_  
trouble saw me  
trouble stayed 

That, of course, is the day things go wrong.  
In fact, they go so wrong the Richter scale of right does not even apply anymore.

To say this day begins like any other days would be a new low level of storytelling, because _of fucking course_ it does. There is no mysterious tension in the air as Geoff awakens, face plastered against his mattress, no sixth sense or mysterious intuition that tells him this is about to burn and crash faster than a designated driver’s spiked Virgin Screwdriver. But at the same time the insistence of it being a completely normal day would place too much importance on the day itself.

It is an unremarkable day, another in a row of unremarkable weeks with nothing but a shot of noradrenaline every now and then when Ryan flips his knife or Jack gets into a bar brawl or the men he meets have AK-47s strapped in front of their chests.

So completely innocuous that Geoff rises, forgoes shaving in favour of growing his moustache (it is a budding project and he gets mocked mercilessly by Jack and mildly smiled at by Ryan), gets dressed and promptly forgets the most part of his day as he goes through it. The usual actions glide through his hands and when he returns to the bar in the late afternoon, he’d be hard pressed to remember what exactly he did all day and whom he met.

Of course there are men with weapons and suits, because slowly he’s emerging into circles where the suppliers do not wear tracksuits and hoodies with cut-off sleeves anymore, they have cufflinks instead of track marks on their wrists and their guns are in leather holsters instead of tucked into the band of their jeans. 

But the essence does not change from what he’d started doing three years ago. Meet a guy. Buy shit. Sell shit. Meet again, an ounce richer and a gram more well-known in the community. Los Santos might not have a particularly welcoming underground, but once someone has cut enough throats to get their way in, they’re grudgingly accepted as long as they’re not actually considered a threat to the current gang leader and his posse.  
Not that they’ve cut many throats until now, with two men and one bar.

The deal he cuts is on the west side of town, so he makes his way back to the bar through the main streets, branching off into lesser populated alleys. It’s still cold for this time of the year, so everyone’s bundled up snugly with thick coats if they can afford it, layers if they can afford it less and freezing if they really can’t.

Geoff, due to a lack of a winter coat that doesn’t clash with the best suit he can afford, belongs to the latter fraction, hands in his pocket as his exhales form puffs of clouds, tiny drops of water rising as fog as he breathes out white. For a moment he considers the possibility of snow as he looks up into the grey, unfriendly sky, condensation rising like the carbon dioxide of the big factories the runner-up for mayor had promised to shut.

There is a spring in his step at West Eclipse Boulevard.

There is a man on his tail at North Rockford Drive.

There is a gun right at his lumbosacral joint at Ginger Street.

And really, he should be more prepared for these sorts of things.  
This might just be self-afflicted, he thinks, the tiniest bit of resigned. What sort of moderately influential trafficker goes out these days with no gun, no back up and a cocky attitude?

The barrel in his spine seems to agree, pushing him forward impatiently as he and his assailant cross through the street towards little Seoul. The direction implies Korean mafia; the hard shoves imply Italian heroin pushers.

Geoff might be rash and his decision oftentimes inappropriate, but even he’s not so damn idiotic as to attempt to make a break for it. Maybe when he gets a good look at whoever’s trying to maneuver him into a quiet alleyway, he’ll get a few punches him, but he’s also a not one to call a glass half-full when there’s only a quarter left. 

There’s a very realistic chance he might not get out of this unharmed, might not even get out of this unharmed. You don’t get to play if you don’t wager your bets and unsurprisingly, in this business, human lives are a very real bet. 

Just as they’re about to cross San Andreas Ave. & 6th though, his self-recognized poignant attempt at conserving dignity falls to very small pieces as they turn the corner.

His brain registers very few things, but those he recalls in stunning detail.  
It’s the woman with a stroller, dressed in expensive running trousers and a neon red thermic vest, hair tied back as she half-walks, half-jogs along. Her child fixes Geoff for a very long second, mouth forming a spit-bubble, blond hair curly and half-flattened to his head.  
It’s the yellow car in the street, tires screeching, the loud phonecall of a businessman arguing with his wife about the children, the glint of the sniper rifle up high in the abandoned building on the corner of San Andreas, a reflection of _blue-white-black-black-black_ through the window.  
The bits of brain on him.  
The scream.

And he barely has time to think _fuck me, this is familiar_ before the woman lets loose a shrill shriek, one manicured hand pointing at him and the dead weight on his back. The businessman stares, phone still at his ear, a female voice filtering through. The baby looks at him, curious. Geoff looks back, for just a measured, steady second.

Then he runs.

###### 

 

He finds Ryan at the eighth floor of the building, kneeling as he stows away the scope in a black case that is not just vaguely familiar. It’s one of the cases they have recently ordered, Jack pointing at the model, something about great field vision and nine millimetre bullets.

For a while, they just stand there. Geoff with his ruined suit and heaving chest and Ryan with his sure, fluid movements. There are bits of blond hair peeking out at the pink-black transition from skin to mask and they’re somehow, sickly recognizant of the baby’s curls he’s seen.  
Neither of them says a thing. Like before, they don’t talk about any matter that does not need to be addressed, really.

Finally, Ryan rises. Turns around, blue eyes measured and calm and cold.

Geoff knows this is make or break and there are a lot of things he could say. Like with Jack before, that frisson of a moment hanging in the air, a sweet high note of matter converging and expanding again, greater than before.  
There’s only one right answer though. One code to unlock that terrible smoothness, to pull those wires tight that move Ryan, that move the Vagabond.

So he stretches out one hand for the rifle case with an almost indulgent smile, like a father watching his son at play, and Ryan hands it over without resistance. The frost in his eyes is melting, turning into fluid and gas in space, in a three-dimensional system.

_“Let’s go hunting, then.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> when will Geoff ever stop being rescued? we just don't know.  
> also i do not know even the least bit about craigslist.


	3. Hodge Conjecture

****

######  Third unsolved problem: Hodge Conjecture. 

****

_Prove that on a projective non-singular algebraic variety over C, any Hodge class is a rational linear combination of classes cl(Z) of algebraic cycles. – Pierre Deligne_

_Or: Prove that an additional irrational shape that has been added onto a rational shape that can be described by a set of equations can be stretched into a rational shape that is also described by a set of equations._

_Or: Prove that something irrational can be transmuted into something rational._

###### 

The third one doesn’t rescue him.

The third one’s a wholly different calibre.  
An entirely new subset of weaponry and Geoff has always been a rifle kind of man. There’s something grounding, something rational and steady about the heavy feeling of a gun in his hand.

Geoff has neither time nor inclination to play games. Oh, he plays and plays and plays, throws coins on the tables and watches the white ball cross red and black and red again, but he does not play what he does not benefit from and those games are usually the ones he emerges from shaking and laughing, with high stakes and even higher gains.

What he does not do is play games with himself.  
He does not count the rings Ryan’s empty glasses leave on the table in the mornings when the two of them stagger into the world living with glassy eyes and bruised eyelids ( _eight, nine, ten, Jack counts disapprovingly and Ryan, ever-lasting, ever-loving insomniac laughs low under his breath_ ), sticky residue on the table and crystallized aspartame/acesulfat-k condensed to the sides of the glass.  
Ryan’s a rifle with the safety off, a shot through the window that’s just gone slightly askew, a bayonet where the shiv at the end might just be sharper than the gun itself.  
They do not ask him what he doesn’t dream about.

He does not count the breaths Jack takes before he starts the cargobob for take-off ( _twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three Ryan mocks with cruel good-naturedness and Jack straightens, tells him to shut the fuck up and rolls off the throttle_ ).  
Jack’s a shotgun. He’s no repetition, no alliteration, no unnecessary literary device. He’s a shotgun and there is really nothing more that needs to be said.

Geoff knows that they need this, disassociating into their own version of escapism. It could be drugs. It could be worse than drugs.  
So when he feels it bubbling up, waves under his skin, he bears it.  
He does not play games.  
And when he needs a shot, he takes a gun.

###### 

(With a gun, he controls the trigger. He loads the bullets and unlocks the safety and decides when to take a shot or when to slip it back into his holster and wait for a better opportunity.)

These days Geoff has a shotgun and a sniper rifle by his side and sometimes he uses the shotgun and sometimes he uses the sniper rifle and just sometimes? He doesn’t use anything at all.

They’re in the business long enough now that he’s recognized. It’s none of those things where the people he deals with hush when he walks and listen when he talks, but it’s close enough. 

Enough to leave that bar and its locked store room behind and move their operation (one of their employees calls it a business and doesn’t understand when Geoff throws his head back and laughs like it’s the best joke he’s ever heard) to an apartment on the corner of Power Street. Vinewood up north is beckoning them, but that’ll take another few months, another few cement blocks with plenty of room for people’s feet in them.

He keeps the bar though. It’s good enough for money laundering purposes.  
There’s talk about selling it once. Just once. Jack’s expression is—not akin to a thunder, but somewhat of a middle-sized rainstorm. It’s enough.  
In the end, he keeps the bar.

The apartment is spacious and has enough bedrooms and living rooms and various other rooms to fit three other people if he’d need to. They have employees now and security detail and after that debacle on St. Andreas Ave he’s taken to wearing a Kevlar vest when leaving.  
Still, Geoff keeps a sniper rifle in the living room and a shotgun by his bedside and it’s close enough.

###### 

Sometimes, just sometimes he’s done with crypticism and witty metaphors, tired of posing as a shadow of himself to impress the kind of people he does business with on a daily basis.

These times he locks himself in his office for the afternoon, calls Burnie and Gus, then Joel and Matt, and then Burnie himself again and emerges three hours later with a voice hoarse from speaking, drinks whatever’s closest straight from the bottle. Looks at Jack and Ryan and whoever’s nearest (usually Lindsay or Caleb or whoever they’re employing for logistics these days— Ryan’s taken to calling them the _editorial team_ ) and tells them _“let’s go.”_

This is one of those evenings.

It finds the three of them plus their extraction team bent over a map of Los Santos. In the age of basically everything either on a hard drive or stored somewhere else, there’s been complaints about using _maps_ of all things, but Geoff, though he’ll be the first to acknowledge that sometimes he does it because it’s fun to fuck with anyone expecting the leader of such a high-digitalized crew to use the same methods on his personal conquests, does have his reasons for still sticking to what is basically a pen-and-paper ops. The major one is that it’s harder than an erection after a private dance from Tila Tequila to be granted access to their files if their access is a piece of paper, burnt after reading. Can’t leave a trail, paper or no paper, if there’s nothing to be left. Intel’s all fine and good but in these situations he prefers the intel to be in their heads and not in their hands.

They are joined tonight by the unexpected addition of Barbara, who’s come over from where Burnie lords over his unrivalled turf.  
She claims to have missed Los Santos and Geoff’s not one to question her, because _holy shitballs_ that woman might look like she could pose as a smiling young sorority girl in a stock photo frame at the nearest Ritz Camera’s, but he’s seen what she does to anyone who bothers her. 

(He’s pretty sure half of their recon team are in love, though, including Lindsay.)

He’ll be glad to have her by their side, especially when it comes to extracting them out of a situation that might potentially turn out sticky, but visits by someone so high up in the Cockbites’ hierarchy are always connected with Burnie having a vested interest in the heists they’re pulling off.  
No matter that Geoff just got off the phone with the man, of course. But Burnie watched him build this up all by himself and it doesn’t matter that Geoff saw the Cockbites rise from a small assortment of friends to the top dogs of his old haunts, always silently acknowledged a member even though he chose the Army, chose Los Santos, chose to make it on his own a million times over just entering a crew he’s always had a place in. It’s a matter of professional integrity or maybe it’s just a matter of Burnie and Gus being nosy fucks.

But Barb’s here nevertheless and she’s already thrown herself in the game headfirst, discussing mounted machine guns in the cargobob they’ll be using to get them out of the neighbourhood with Ryan. He’s pretty sure he’s heard the words _exploding flares_ more than once and decides not to ask.

Their target is one of the more high-end jewelry stores in Vinewood, just outside of the small turf Geoff’s taken to think of as his own. Of course, the local kingpin’s becoming less and less pleased with a budding rival as time goes on, but they’ll need time and resources to actually deal with him. He’s not stupid enough to try and take down someone a weight class above him, but. There’s a possibility that it might just work one day. For now, that castle’s still built upon pillars of sand and there’s no use investing in masonry when the foundations are just going to crumble away beneath his feet.  
Geoff hates sand anyways.

The heist is still a daring move, though, the first time they’re staking claim to a deal just on the fringe of their comfort zone. Lindsay had been their primary scope, posing as a truly terrifying cliché of a trust fund daughter.  
She’s proven herself to not only be useful as one of the best handlers they’ve had so far, but also with coiffed hair, a smile that reveals whitened teeth and dollars ready to spend. Together with her smitten, yet meek fiancé Kerry in his very best impression of a rich, incompetent Milquetoast freshly graduated from Ivy League, they had been wildly successful. 

Apparently there’d be a new batch of fresh-cut diamonds from Africa (with very hazy origins and a capital B for blood diamonds unsaid, Geoff bets) in just a few days, the eager clerk had let slip. It’s almost enough to amuse them, the thought of a 10% commission overriding enough red flags in the man’s brain to let loose a few company secrets. Lindsay had rewarded the man with a smile so sharp you could cut said diamonds on it and her card, carefully rerouted to a burner phone her so-called secretary had received a call to this afternoon.

And now here they are.

The actual heist itself is simplicity. Break into the jewelry store while the transfer is taking place, eliminate witnesses and security cameras, have one of the IT team delete all files on the shipment they were supposed to receive and leave the store a few millions in expensive gems richer and the store owners fuming. The buy’s not actually legal, so there’s a very low-level risk of any law enforcement being alerted to their coup.

The problem is getting them out. This particular store’s not only famed for their wide variety of engagement and wedding rings, they unfortunately – in this case – also harbour a collection of Inka jewellery, safely kept behind a giant safe and an alarm system that upon further inspection had drawn comparison to the infamous Grecko player tracker from no less than three different people.

They had considered having a go at the vault, but the gold is too well-known. If they had a private buyer, yes, but storing this kind of merchandise away until they find someone to take it off their hands with minimum fuss is too hot for even them to handle. To top that off, even if they melt it down, it won’t be worth the risk. Not to mention that they’d need an actual safe-cracker for the depository.

(The rest of them had just looked at him and went _no_ collectively when he had mentioned it, so there’s that.)

So their main focus is just the diamonds, even though the removal will be enough on its own.

“The briefcase will most likely be chained to the courier’s wrist, so you’re going to have to shoot it off,” Barbara (who has experience no one dares ask about with intercepting handoffs) explains, with Kerry next to her nodding in accordance.

“Right,” Jack agrees mildly, before fixing his gaze on Geoff again, who’s just bordering on the slightest bit of _fucking annoyed_ because hell, this is his territory and his plan and though he knows Barbara’s far from meaning to meddle, it’s still an unwanted reminder that she hails from a crew far larger and far more potent than his is at the moment.

“Right,” Geoff repeats after a beat, then taps his capped felt-tip on the blueprints of the store Caleb so graciously obtained for them.  
“First order: take the cameras out. Ryan, you’re with me on ground team. There’s two in the front, one in the hallway, two in the back. We’re expecting a van outside with extra security detail in constant contact with the actual team inside. After taking that one out, we got about, what, two minutes if we calculate generously to get inside before anyone gets suspicious.”

That is directed at Ryan, leaning against the counter with his arms crossed and the fizz of a carbonated bottle of pop besides him, who merely takes a noisy sip in response. Geoff narrows his eyes at him in exasperation he does not truly mean.

“After that, we take care of the cameras up front. Then the hallway, if they’re not completely idiotic they’ll have at least two men patrolling the corridor up there.”

Ryan puts his glass down, setting about replying with a smile that only slightly reaches his eyes.

“ _No fucking grenades_ , because I am _so fucking sick_ of my drycleaner complaining about brick dust and bone marrow on my clothing,” Geoff forcefully continues before he can get a word in because he just knows where this is going to lead and he does not feel like dealing with another Little Seoul disaster at all.

Ryan, unsurprisingly, closes his mouth.

There’s a subdued titter from the assorted gathering – at this point, they’re all more than familiar with whatever this is, but too diplomatic to actually mention it – but Geoff ignores the whole lot, pen jamming into the paper more vehemently.

“Then we advance into the backroom, where the deal’s scheduled to take place, right?”  
That one’s directed at Lindsay, who nods, a finger twirled around a lock of her still impressively done up hair.  
“Right,” she agrees and at these times he’d like to give her a fucking raise for appearing to be the only same person in the band of monkeys he’s trying to control here.

“I shoot the cameras out, Ryan offs the couriers. Your choice of weaponry, just don’t make it noisy.”  
He might just regret that one by the way Ryan sighs seemingly good-naturedly. If a small cube of TNT pops up along the way, at least he’ll know who to blame.

“I’ll be hovering with the heli,” Jack seamlessly picks up on where he left off, chin resting on his interlaced fingers, bent over forwards to survey the map. He’s always like this during their pre-action planning, always so very still. It contrasts the rest of them, arguing around, always in a flurry of motions.  
Jack’s just _there_. Sometimes Geoff cannot fathom the trials that come with acting as the monolith in the midst of their vortices. It’s gotta be exhausting, to be so stationary amidst so many people who move _so fucking much_.

“Yeah, no,” he clarifies in a decidedly obscure manner.  
“Hovering? Really bad idea, buddy. The heli’s unmarked, so it’s gonna be a hell of a lot smarter to park it somewhere close to the river where it’s not gonnda draw too much attention and then touch down at our call. This way we don’t risk any calls to the police department questioning why there’s a stationary aircraft vehicle sitting there in prime sight over an expensive fucking jeweller.”

All the while, Jack’s nodding along like it’s his very own idea, his expression nothing but compliance. It’s utterly refreshing that the man has so little ego when it comes to this. Spares them a hell of a lot of cockfights. Ryan, on the other hand, is sometimes less than happy to be relegated to the role of glorified muscle, but even he concedes this evening, hands chilled from the condensation of his glass as he approaches the table, taking the pen where Geoff’s hand is loosely clasped around it.

“Anything else?”

No one moves a muscle. In the bright, sterile light of the lamp suspended above them, a truly atrocious piece of interior decorating, they almost look washed out, a band of bleached and bone-dry polaroids faded with age.  
Geoff looks at them and smiles, easy confidence ever more effortlessly coming upon his beck and call, because _they_ come ever easier at his call.

“Let’s go then.” 

###### 

There are people who believe a job is always action, always flying bullets, shouted commands and _go go go_. Geoff’s usual response to coming into contact with one of those people is along the lines of _fuck them_.  
His second response, more clarified, is _fuck them harder_.

There is nothing even remotely exciting about sitting in an unmarked van, tags carefully removed with faked papers and a convincing story about a new buy in case the police deems them suspicious enough to stop. It’s a blade’s edge between really damn boring and unnerving enough to make a team anxious. Which is bad enough in its own respect. Impatience causes tension, tension causes a loss of focus. And a lack of focus usually comes back to fuck them over sideways. 

They’ve been waiting for fourty minutes now, twenty longer than scheduled because there’s this one car parked right beside the jewellery store that just won’t leave. It’s enough to cause Kerry, usually almost as collected as Jack is, to drum his fingers against the steering wheel in a repetitious _snick-snick-snick_ that almost snaps the very thin thread of Geoff’s own patience. 

Worse even, Ryan’s pulled one of his hunting knives out, the one with the serrated edge and he’s not yet to the point of playing around with it, but clearly already unsettled enough to run his fingers over the wicked curve, skin catching on layered steel, the tip sharp enough to cut into his epidermis. There’s no blood welling up because Ryan’s both careful and not an idiot, but there will be blood and not necessarily his, if this turns out to take even longer.

“Bravo One in position,” Jack’s voice crackles over the comm, the unmistakable sounds of helicopter blades and the smoky night air nearby from where he’s stationed near the bay, engine running on standby to extract them as soon as possible if their good old fashioned B&E turns out to fall to pieces sooner rather than later.  
“What’s the hold-up, Alpha One?”

“Some third-party vehicle parked in front of the shop,” Ryan answers in Geoff’s stead, a noticeable veneer of an edge bleeding through his words.

“Seems like some kids, from what I can see from here,” Kerry pipes up,  
“They’re smoking. Doesn’t seem like they’re here to pull anything.”

Of fucking course they’re just sitting there smoking. Karma has it out for Geoff more often than not and it’s a sweet, sweet reminder that it likes to grab him by the hair and _fuck him up his fucking anus_ that two potheads with a bad case of situational timing have chosen this alley of all to smoke a bowl in their car. By the way Ryan’s eyes have misted over with something vicious, something almost feral in its single-minded focus, they won’t stay there for much longer if it’s up to him.

Not much to consider in this case

“Collateral damage,” Geoff decides after a split-second of consideration and out of the corner of his eye he sees Ryan actually _laugh_ , the raving madman, his knife flashing razor-sharp patterns along the walls of the van, reflecting the white and yellow and red of street lamps and neon advertisements the city tries to cover their ugly up with.  
“We’ll take them out as we go in.”

They – as it turns out – do not have to.

The courier and his security seem to share the opinion that the inhabitants of the car are bound to fall along the wayside, judging by the way there’s the unmistakable rumble of a very expensively armoured car in the near distance, followed by the shadow of a sleek G-Class pulling up to the side of the store.

“Don’t let them get back in that car,” Geoff murmurs, more to Ryan than to himself. It’d be immensely superfluous to even mention it, but he deems it necessary due to the fact that the man actually seems _disappointed_ when they hear two very soft _pops_. It’s not even the cork of a champagne bottle, more of the sound a jar makes when the vacuum lid is opened, barely audible.

The kids in the cheap white family-style car ahead them seem to have become very tired very suddenly, from the way they slump over the front board, one window dark with sticky residue.  
“Naptime,” Geoff whispers to hear Ryan and Jack laugh quietly.  
There’s a moment when he’s more tempted to mod it into next time for Ryan. Strange, wonderful Ryan who melts when he puts his hands on him and smiles at him with sun in his mouth and an abyss behind his seawater eyes.

When the courier and his security detail, six hulking men with brachial muscles bigger than their heads and neck veins popping in what seems to be a formidable expression of a king cobra, have entered the building, Geoff clears his throat, more a formality than anything else.

He doesn’t say _showtime_ because this is not a circus and he doesn’t say _good luck_ because this is not a bet they’re trying to win.

Geoff always says _“let’s go”_ because when he tells them to jump, they ask how high and when he tells them _go_ , all of them go, go like wound up clockwork or soldiers, not blind with faith but utterly uncaring in their reliance.  
It chokes him up sometimes and maybe that’s why he clears his throat before this.

He says it.

They go.

###### 

The plan works, astoundingly going off without a hitch, right up until that moment where they’ve shot the men, shot the cameras, shot the chain connecting human flesh to steel briefcase and are ready to book it out of the room with a very nice addition of a few hundred grams of compressed carbon (and a few graphite pencils because Ryan can’t, just can’t for the life of him, for the death of him, resist a good pun).

The noise, however, is a bit of a deterrant.

The point is, as following:  
Geoff is not a mathematician, neither is he a physicist. But even he can solve simple equations without the help of a calculator.  
And there’s something about this that just doesn’t add up.  
A. Ten people entered this building tonight.  
B. Eight of them are dead by his or Ryan’s own hand.  
C. There is no other way in or out than the one they’ve taken and no one has entered the building while they were busy deplacing a bit of human matter or the glass of lenses with a few bullets.  
D. Humans don’t materialize out of thin air.

All of that adds up rationally, without a flaw or any stretch of logic.

Still doesn’t explain why there’s some cursing with the vicariousness of a sailor in the room beyond, the one that contains not only a vault, but _the_ vault.

E. There are eleven people in this building tonight.

For a second he’s torn between _fuck me_ and _fuck this_ , but luckily Ryan seems to have solved the problem for himself with the easy grace of a former IT professional and has unmistakeably pinpointed the easiest way to resolve this.  
Remove the unwelcome variable.  
If they’re lucky and the police about as incompetent as they have proven to be in the last five or six jobs they’ve pulled, they might have just found themselves a strawman.

It’s the kind of karma Geoff has honestly come to expect after the debacle with the car just out front. He and Lady Luck seem to have a deal going where he takes a few punches, but then rolls with them as soon as he’s caught his breath. And he’s caught his breath a whole fucking lot in the last few hours. It’s the most fucked up version of Liar’s Dice he’s ever encountered, but somehow it always seems to work out in his favour.

There’s sometimes a moment of consideration before Ryan does something really, really fucked up, and Geoff honest-to-God loves watching that split second of moral choices and retribution and _what goes around comes back around_ flash in his eyes before he shrugs it off with his habitual, eerie smoothness and does it anyways.

There’s none of that now as he busts the door open to what is the biggest fucking piece of a worst case scenario Geoff could have ever possibly imagined in his wildest dreams. On a scale from one to ten this is about a nine and one-quarter. Only way the kid hunched over on the floor, fiddling with wires, _the rigged vault for fuck’s sake, the safe door rigged with actual fucking explosions, what in shitmongering Christ’s name_ , could be worse if the vault was set to explode right now.

And of course, because Liar’s Dice is an asshole game and kicks you in the balls as soon as you’re coming close to scoring full board, it does.

Geoff’s not sure how he does it, but through all the input of about twenty minor bombs causing the greatest safe-bouncing he’s witnessed so far, the sound of an alarm going off and what seems to be their cargobob in the distance, his voice actually manages to reach Ryan.  
“Don’t.”

It’s enough to stop him dead in his tracks, rifle poised to pop the kid at any moment. It’s a stupid fucking move in all sincerity, because Geoff has the opportunity to get rid of a witness and give the police a perp.  
But, and that is all he can think of that moment, damn.  
These explosions.

It’s a good thing he’s not exactly little known for being a fickle bastard, since it probably saves their unwelcome guest’s life.  
Not five seconds later, he is already regretting this little bout of capriciousness immensely.

Over the sound of what seems to be an impressive array of expletives, Geoff tells them – both of them – _“let’s go”_.

###### 

They hit the ground running, Ryan’s hand around the man’s wrist in an iron grip, leaving corpses and gold alike behind, as they tear through the store towards the entrance, the dead clawing at their back and the heat burning them at their front. Geoff can’t honestly say he usually puts his heart into shooting cops, but he’s usually more on point than this pathetic display. Usually a lot sharper, but he keeps thinking about how in all the world is he going to explain this to Jack.  
Explain the newest very explosive addition to their crew of dead men walking with a sway, of dead women smiling with an edge.

 _(why did you take him_  
_he looked like he could be useful_  
_you fucking liar)_

Later, there will be a table with the three of them while Michael – Michael with short hair hinting at the promise of curls, with the loudest _“they killed my fucking friends!”_ they’ve ever heard, Michael they dragged out of this hellhole kicking and screaming, with his fists flying until Ryan had strongarmed him into submission – sleeps the sleep of the desperate and holy in the next room over.

There will be Ryan’s cautious admission (because Ryan is, as much as Geoff holds him in the palm of his hand, at his best a fucking psychopath) that the vendetta he will certainly develop against both state and police department after the courier had ordered his friends (his escape they figure) executed might just be a stepping stone for them to place him on.  
To form him, cultivate him into something they could be drawing from.

Jack will sigh and say _“at least he’s a damn crack shot at blowing things up”_ and withhold any further opinion.

Geoff— he’s not really sure what to say. What to think.

Because he’d seen Michael, an Archangel with an AK-47 and spitting with rage, a dragon in front of his gold and he’d thought _yes_ and then he’d seen his work, the careful mechanical rig he’d brought with him, a bouquet of bombs and thought _yes_ again and then he’d forgot everything rational and logical and just thought _oh God yes_ for the third time.

They won’t keep him if he can’t be contained—this is not _The Taming of the Shrew_ , as Ryan had quipped with a smile a little too dark to be just just wry, but. Under all the admissions they’re going to make about how this is never going to work, about how Michael ( _“my name is Michael”_ he’d finally admitted under the pressure of both Geoff and Ryan barking the kind of questions at him their drill sarges would have been exceedingly proud of, had finally caved, given a little ground but held onto the rest with claws and teeth) will never slot himself into the careful shape that they have created. 

He’s too nasty a shape, too violent, too much of a heterologous algebraic variety.  
He’s a set of solutions written in something Geoff can’t figure out, neither a gun nor a rifle.  
He’s a grenade and Geoff usually doesn’t play with explosives. 

He doesn’t play games with himself, but.  
Michael also has eyes in the shape of whole perfect parables and the chin of a young Emperor, the kind who sets his whole city on fire.  
Michael looks at him like Geoff’s a God and he himself is a King and he is so very much unafraid.

There is a high probability that he will never turn out an algebraic circle on top of their manifold, but for the love of all that is holy in the world, Geoff would like to say to him that.

_He just might._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am sorry for any casual remarks about anal sex, but thought it too true to character to remove. if not, let me know.  
> i also have a tumblr @ thekingofcarvenstone.

**Author's Note:**

> tbc.
> 
> pre-tagged for clarity.


End file.
